


what’s the colour of your grief

by wearethedreamersofdreams



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Colour Association, Gen, Grief, To Someone, Whumptober 2020, the doctor needs to TALK, the pain that comes with it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27198758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearethedreamersofdreams/pseuds/wearethedreamersofdreams
Summary: tell me Doctor, what is the colour of your grief?”
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> day 25 of Whumptober 2020  
> Prompt: Grief

For once it wasn’t a very bad day spend on the planet. Her companions spend most of their time on the planet in a natural spa, which after recent events they’d really deserved.The Doctor being the Doctor left them there, knowing that they’d be in good hands while she was moving around the planet, just checking out the surrounding areas.

She’d been walking around a little area that was all trees and flowers, and the Doctor had never felt as at ease as she did there since her last regenerations.

It’s also where she ran into one of the locals, who was picking flowers and humming a beautiful song.

“Hello stranger, what brings you to the outskirts of town?” The stranger had said, while the Doctor looked around the beautiful little meadow they were in. She just shrugged.

“Just looking around, beautiful spot you have here.” The Doctor said, while slowly sitting down cross legged in a little patch of grass.

The peace and quietness of the area, and the ease and calmness that came off of the stranger didn’t give her the idea she was in immediate danger.

_Would you look at that._

The stranger stopped picking the flowers, turned around and the Doctor couldn’t help but react. It wasn’t much, it was mostly just a reaction of awe and inspiration perhaps? Just like all the other locals the stranger looked completely human, but it was her aura that was giving off something otherworldly.

The stranger had come and sat across from the Doctor on the ground, their knees barely touching. The Doctor couldn’t help but look at the eyes. They were a vibrant light blue, almost translucent, which made the Doctor feel as if she was drowning.

“What’s your name” The Doctor wondered, while still looking into the beautiful eyes of the stranger, who hopefully wouldn’t be a stranger anymore for much longer.

“I’m Anura, and you?” The Doctor couldn’t help but smile. Anura’s voice was that of angels, soft and lyrical at the same time.

The same sound Gallifreyan sounded like if it was spoken properly.

“I’m the Doctor, nice to meet you Anura.” Anura just nodded and bit her lip in thought.

“The Doctor huh? Does that mean you can make ill people better? Or are you more of the ‘helping everyone I see in pain’ type of person.” The Doctor didn’t know why but she felt compelled to not to mistrust and dismiss this person, even though they’d just met each other.

Recently, the Doctor wasn’t even sure herself anymore what her name exactly stood for. So all she could do was shrug.

“I used to think I’d be able to heal the universe. When the time came when I had to decide what my name would carry for a meaning, I went with Doctor cause it stood for the possibility of healing. But recently I’ve lost that if that makes sense? I guess that I don’t know at this point of Doctor still fits me, or that I’ve lost the meaning of the word, and in turn what I stand for.” Anura just nodded, looked up at the beautiful blue sky for a moment, which made the sunlight reflect in her translucent blue eyes.

“If I may guess, and bear with me cause my mother used to say that I was a horrible guesser, it might have been right at some point. But people change, _you_ change, and there is nothing wrong with that. You’re at a crossroads of some sort, which eventually needs to be taken either left or right. You spend your whole life helping others cause that’s what you stood for. But now your crossroads have taken you towards a point where you need to figure out who will help you? You’ve always been the healer, healed people, healed relationships, planets and the universe, but who heals the Doctor when the time is there? Especially now, now that you seem to find more pain then joy in your life. People die, and for someone who’s been alive for centuries, doesn’t that bring a lot of _grief?_ ” The Doctor swallowed.

Anura might have been more right then the Doctor would like to admit.

Anura had moved closer to the Doctor, their knees almost touching. And where the Doctor normally didn’t like proximity, at least not in this body, she found that this time, she didn’t mind all that much.

The meadow was quiet, by now the Doctor had closed her eyes and let that one question of Anura mull over in her mind, while Anura made her last move and now sat cross legged completely across from the Doctor, their knees touching, the Doctor having her eyes closed, while Anura put one of the smaller flowers behind her right ear.

_Tell me Doctor, what is the colour of your grief?_

When the Doctor opened her eyes again, Anura was gone, the Meadow looked untouched as if she’d never been there with anyone else but her own thoughts.

_Would you look at that._

The Doctor had gone back to the little market square, trying to see if she could find Anura amongst the local townspeople.

Anura’s question had made her think.

At first the Doctor had thought the question was ridiculous and didn’t make a lot of sense, until she’d mulled it over for a second while walking back towards town through the woods.

She’d seen dead, she caused it and she was helpless to avoid it in some cases.

The grief she felt for the dead of her companions was as black as the night sky, evil and haunting and never letting her go. The times she did fall asleep, she’d be haunted by nightmares, the eyes of her companions as black as the colour she’d compare the grief she felt for them too.

She’d seen planets die due to their own misgiving assumptions they were on the right track of getting things done. She’d thought of that grief as a lime coloured greenish hue. Civilisations would perish on those planets, and generally it ended in some weird quiet way, dark red was the colour she’d accompanied with all those creatures dying, red representing their blood, their livelyhood. If she had tried to heal those people, or those planets, the grief wasn’t as strong as for her companions. So all together she would wrap them into a mixed bundle of soft pink when it came to her grief.

T.S Eliot had written poems about it at one point, and the Doctor couldn’t help but repeat that one sentence in her head.

_This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper._

A whimper of lime green sparkles and dark red splatters, grief heavy in its soft pink tint.

Then there was her own dying. Or at least the dying of her body for it to come back again. She would grief for her last body after she’d regenerated. Which was difficult cause most times she’d already been thrown into a new adventure of some sort.

The grief for her past selves was wrapped in a soft yellow, sparkling with regenerative energy all around.

She concluded that her grief was a mixed ball of everything, all colours and harsh lights. Its where she got her energy from to just jump around and be one big ball of energy all the time.

But Anura had called her out, she wasn’t processing those colours, her grief. She’d dump it in a corner, and just leave it there to rot.

“Can I help you?” The Doctor startled when one of the towns people asked her that question, the Doctor frowned.

“Can you tell me where I can find Anura?” The local’s face fell. The Doctor didn’t like the light blue of grieving sadness it reminded her of.

“Anura passed away a few weeks ago she had fallen quite ill and her parents didn’t have the money to get her to the local doctor. We made a memorial for her though, would you like to see it?” The Doctor had gone quiet, if Anura was dead… then who…

“We believe that the spirits of the dead can be found in our forests. If you need closure of some sort it might be a good idea to go and have a look there. There’s a beautiful meadow where Anura used to go to pick Amaranth flowers, not much unlike the one you have there.” The Doctor slowly moved her hand towards her ear, and low and behold a flower was stuck behind her ear.

“Here it is, I’ll leave you to grieve in peace.” The Doctor just nodded, they’d made a beautiful secluded area filled with flowers, and poetry. The Doctor sat down cross legged in front of it, just like she had done when she’d met Anura in the forest.

And the Doctor cried.

_Would you look at that._

If grief had a colour, the Doctor was sure her grief for Anura was Amaranth… not quite red, but magnificent in its presence and its wisdom and knowledge.


	2. all is now harmed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _But Anura was a Ghost, she had died weeks before the Doctor had even met her, and so the Doctor had run into echoes of this magnificent creature’s spirit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is now a multichapter fic about colour association and grief  
> this fic will probs be AU when Revolution of the Daleks airs  
> 

**_All is now harmed_ **

_Tell me Doctor, what is the colour of your grief?_

That question hadn’t popped back up for the longest of time, she had distracted herself with adventures together with the fam, or just mindless additions to the TARDIS without pandering to the question that had been posed to her after visiting the planet where she thought she’d ran into Anura.

But Anura was a Ghost, she had died weeks before the Doctor had even met her, and so the Doctor had run into echoes of this magnificent creature’s spirit.

She thought she had answered the question while thinking about it, the Doctor thought she had settled on a colour, but she should have known, as someone who lives for so long, things, and so the colours with it… change.

Just like Anura had said, things change, and so the doctor changes with it.

And now? The Doctor had found out about her past, about how it was all one big lie, wrapped together in the story of the _timeless child_. How the master had known about it and told her while they were at Gallifrey. Which the Master had destroyed _again_. Her grief had turned into some twisted colour of red then. Anger towards all the people that had lied to her. The Master who had used her as some sort of toy to just play around with.

Rage towards the death of her people, rage towards the Master, and rage towards the destruction of her home.

A deep dark scarlet red, and oh _would you look at that._

Her anger had been just as red as the jumpsuit she was wearing now.

She didn’t remember how long ago it was when the Judoon had come into her TARDIS and taken her for a life’s worth of imprisonment in a cell far away in a tiny corner of the universe, and at first she had kept herself busy with all things she could do in her square little space so that she could distract her ever so busy mind from that one question that had been chasing her ever since she’d left the planet Anura had come from.

And she had done everything, from punching the walls until her knuckles were bleeding, to yelling so hard that she’d lost her voice.

It didn’t help that the only time she had seen someone was when they’d given her the jumpsuit.

And now she was grieving again, grieving the fact that she, the Doctor, a name that for many would give hope whenever it was whispered had now lost hope herself, she was grieving the loss of that she’d imagined, icy blue and endless, just as blue as the eyes of Anura.

_Would you look at that_

At first the Doctor had tried to keep track of time, she’d scratched the days, or at least the days she’d assumed were passing in the walls of her cell.

It hadn’t been very good for her fingernails if anything, but at leas keeping track of time had kept her mind _busy_.

But then the walls had ended up being full, and the Doctor realised she wasn’t even sure it was correct anymore. Not talking to anyone had made her feeling for time just go completely _off_. Her sense for time now gone, and she’d guessed she mourned that as well for a little while.

She’d like to think that would have been the colour of the light brown of the tallies on her prison walls, mocking her in all its glory.

That’s how she ended curled up in a corner of herself, trying to mumble herself out of a deep dark corner her brain had been heading to without any stimulus or people to talk to.

Which is why the question had slowly come back to her again, dreadful and ever present looming over her like a dark grey cloud on a bad day full of rain and thunder.

Grief in all it’s glory, was just like her an ever changing process of multicoloured splashes. Some days so loud, so _white_ that the Doctor didn’t know anymore what was going on around her.

That’s how she felt when she cried in front of the memorial.

It had happened more if she was being honest, especially after she’d realized O was actually the Master.

When the white of utter despair and grief for everything the Doctor had ever known became too much, she’d hide in one of the many rooms of the TARDIS, where she’d cry without the Fam ever the wiser to it.

And that’s where she is now, in a corner of a cell, lightyears away from the fam that this body first saw. They probably don’t even know the Doctor is still alive, which means that they are grieving as well and she never wanted that for them and _oh_.

She’s crying again, not for Anura, not even for herself and her predicament, she’d do this a thousand lifetimes if it meant her fam was safe and sound on earth.

_Would you look at that_

She’s crying for the fact that her fam probably don’t know anything better than that the Doctor died on that faithful day on Gallifrey, exploding in colours of red and orange and clouded by grey smoke.

They’d been grieving _her_ and she doesn’t want that.

She doesn’t want them to feel the all encompassing white she’d been feeling when she’d mourned Anura.

She doesn’t want them to feel the all encompassing white she’s feeling right now, huddled in her little corner in a cell somewhere in the middle of an unknown Galaxy.

If grief had a colour, the Doctor was sure today the grief for her fam was white, combined with a soft orange, reminding her of the vibrancy of the fam, but also the knowledge that they’d be in pain, thinking her dead. None the wiser to what had really happened to the Doctor.

_Now would you look at that_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you could say my fixation on ending as many paragraphs as possible with the phrase would you look at that can me because of two reasons.  
> One: I think those moments of realisation are important, especially when the doctor sees or realizes what these colours means to her and that she (at least partly) can close off that chapter of her looooong life.  
> two: once I read a beautiful Wynonna Earp fic which had even more beautiful use of this sentence in it and I guess this is sort of an hommage to that.
> 
> lemme know what you think! I love writing but I love talking with others about it even more. There will be chapters added in the future along a similar line.
> 
> I tweet:  
> @_JenniferOh_
> 
> I do tons of other stuff, including editing videos:  
> https://linktr.ee/JenniferOh

**Author's Note:**

> I think... not to pat my own back, but I'm intense proud of this one.  
> recently I have been dealing with the potential grief of knowing you'll lose people you love, and it's... I found that I dissasociate a lot when that happens.  
> Which made me think that the Doctor... as someone who sees so much... would just disconnect altogther would she not? I don't know, I at least have a lot of feelings on it.
> 
> Anura as a name in India would mean knowledge, and without really being there, I think Anura bestowed some sort of wisdom on the Doctor.
> 
> Do me a favour and google Amaranth flowers, they might not be the nicest looking flowers you'll ever see, but their colour (which is the colour Amaranth) is magnificent.
> 
> come yell at me on different places:  
> https://linktr.ee/JenniferOh


End file.
